Acuite and PlanGrid, both leaders in construction productivity software, have partnered to offer the construction sector a comprehensive solution that improves performance through streamlining project delivery and generating insights and analytics. Based in San Francisco, PlanGrid’s construction productivity software is used on more than 500,000 projects in 78 countries.
Construction productivity software has been game changing in the construction industry throughout the past few years. Traditionally, project teams have gathered at the end of a month to run through spreadsheets and data to analyse how they were tracking - often uncovering hidden problems and delays that should have been rectified earlier. Now, "monthly reports in real time" give project managers and executive management the ability to recognise issues and jump in as soon as they become apparent, enabling conversations to happen before the fact instead of constantly fighting fires that are often only noticed as they start to delay and derail the project.
New Zealand company, Acuite, was launched in 2014 to provide a construction-specific business intelligence reporting platform that plugs into existing systems and gives real-time dashboard views into project and portfolio health. It also provides insights into trends and analytics across critical reporting KPI’s of time, cost, quality, health, and safety and relationships. This information is available not only on an individual level, but across the whole project, within regions and across different regions.
PlanGrid is the leader in construction productivity software. The company empowers contractors, owners, designers, and architects to easily and seamlessly collaborate throughout the entire project lifecycle by streamlining document control and distribution, and providing teams with real-time access to all relevant construction information from any device.
Acuite’s new integration with PlanGrid facilitates critical project KPI information flow between platforms. Project data collected at the source through PlanGrid populates Acuite’s analytics dashboards, giving users the ability to identify trends, track performance improvements, highlight poor performance, reduce risk and improve margins.
The data-driven approach helps customers complete projects more efficiently, to a higher quality and with improved safety standards. Everyone on the worksite is up-to-date with developments, risks and changes.
David Speight, COO and co-founder of Acuite says it is important to his company to tap into PlanGrid as a best-of-breed system, to enhance services to customers.
"Since the cloud has gone mainstream, and the influx of mobile devices on the worksite, there is an expectation out in the field that technology will be available to make life easier," Speight said.
"The commercial construction industry is time poor and people want to get out, not do admin. Communications can, as a result, take a back seat," he said. "We roll all the info at project level to regional and portfolio views. If the contractor chooses, they can also give the client access to certain KPI information, building transparency and trust between client and contractor, which has in the past been a challenging area."
"Acuite is an exciting new addition to our growing partner ecosystem," said James Cook, head of strategic alliances and partnerships at PlanGrid. "PlanGrid gives users the tools to collect and share real-time intelligence from the field, and Acuite will now help our customers make even better use of that rich data to make stronger business decisions and build more effectively."
A common barrier in construction projects is keeping on top of consultant response times to queries, an architect’s response to a design question, or any of the other contractors who are part of the vast chain. Acuite’s insights makes it possible to instantly visualize and report on subcontractor and consultant response times as well as the ability to set and track benchmarks around response times early on to increase the chances of a successful project outcome.
"The industry is so dynamic and people are expecting to use technology more and more," said Speight. "It is becoming increasingly important to use data to manage performance, providing transparency so stakeholders are aligned and not referring to different versions of the truth. This will go a long way to shift the sector from the constant adversarial relationships that are often the unfortunate outcome of years of work delivering a project."
Acuite customers are reaping real benefits from Acuite's continuing development and partner integration. Long term client Dominion Constructors, Programming Manager, Richard Joseph said: "The strength of our existing systems and Acuite combined together is to give access to accurate information quickly so that our staff focus on our core function and business which is constructing projects; not extracting and sifting data."
| A Acuite release || march 26, 2018 |||
